2015 Year in Review

Each year we take a moment to review our projections against the actual season results. First lets look at the team projections. We definitely missed on the Kansas City Royals and their World Series win. On the positive side, we did predict playoff runs for the Mets, Cardinals, Dodgers, Pirates and Blue Jays. Our only miss in the NL was the Cubs over the Nationals. The AL is another story. In addition to the Royals, we also missed on the Astros, Rangers, and Yankees. Predicting 50% of the playoff participants isn’t bad considering the number of roster changes that happen during the course of the season.

For individual projections, we were pleasantly surprised that MORPS was the number one overall projection system in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) according to The Baseball Projection Project. The 2014 results were published in March on Fangraphs – click here. Based upon improvements implemented for 2015, our hope is that those results are replicated when 2015 results are published later this year. For fantasy owners, this means that MORPS has the lowest error rate of all published projection systems on the market. A lower error rate means that you can rely on the order that players are ranked within the MORPS projection system.

Overall predictive capability was another rating category tackled by The Baseball Projection Project. MORPS didn’t do as well in this category. Upon analysis, this is due to the regression to the mean built into the MORPS engine. This doesn’t have a huge impact on established players. It does have an impact on players with three or less years of experience or players returning from lengthy injuries. We’ll be looking into this further to determine if there is a way to compete effectively in both categories effectively in the future.

Going into 2016, we are confident that our free projection system stacks up quite well with all of the systems out there. This includes those that cost quite a bit of money to access.